Last Friday was a quiet day at the pub: the florist and the gravedigger were there, but that was it. So, I started at some point talking to the bartender, a really nice and friendly Irish guy, but who, like all Irish guys, has something scary about him. He also didn’t have much to do, so I started to complain about my life, about how tired I was and such. Indeed, for the last few months, I have been working like crazy. As I told him, I am seeing one of the periodic periods of laziness approaching, those times when I do nothing. I find this alternating between working like crazy and doing nothing really puzzling. Actually, for some time—a long time ago—it caused me some anxiety because, after spending a few months without really doing math, I started wondering if I had run out of problems or ideas. By now, I just take it as the way things are. My sister used to describe this state of doing nothing as me being on “biological rest,” like mackerels and such. There might actually be some truth to that, but I think there is also the issue that, while my friend the geologist—the one the being insists is a miner—always has stones to crack and carry around, when thinking about math, there are not many routine chores with which one can fill time when there is nothing better to do. Yes, I could be a better referee, I could be less of an expert at missing talks, I could take better care of answering emails on time—or at all—but that could be really dangerous because people might come to the conclusion that I have suffered a crisis of faith and have reformed myself, and the expectation might arise that in the future I will keep responsibly taking care of those horrible chores. So, when I am not working like crazy, I do nothing. Or rather, I do nothing besides dedicating myself full-time to my latest obsession.

I tend to unreasonably get obsessed with things, like kind of unreasonably falling in love. A while ago, I got obsessed with picking up trash on the street, and I spent hour upon hour cleaning the streets in my neighborhood. Last year, I got obsessed with reading fiction, and man, did I read. There was a period when I spent amazing amounts of time fighting weeds. For months at a time, I cooked only Chinese. Then I cooked something else for another long stretch. At some point, I listened to all episodes of The Rest Is History. I got obsessed with climate change and with understanding investing. Now, the normal process is that these obsessions arrive for some random reason, then they intensify, and at some point, they peak. But then they don’t really disappear: I still go once a week to pick up trash, spend time in our field fighting weeds—or rather, brambles—read fiction (I recently enjoyed Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk very much), don’t eat meat and limit how much I fly, take care of investing, cook Chinese, and sometimes listen to The Rest Is History. All of this in a much more leisurely way than in the height of the craze, but still there.

A bit more than a year ago, I started obsessing with degoogling, by which I mean moving away from big tech companies. In fact, although Google is pretty insidious with all that targeted publicity in things like YouTube, in my opinion, Google is the least bad of them all. However, “degoogle” sounds much better than “defacebook.” Now, while not eating meat is a pretty clear line I am not crossing, the goal when degoogling was never to have nothing to do with them. Just to have as little to do as possible, looking for alternatives elsewhere. Not eating meat is something you can decide today, and then you just don’t eat meat. Degoogling is a process. A long process because I largely live online, and these companies are everywhere. The latest step in the process is that I am moving to Linux. Linux used to be just horrible to run. Nothing connected properly, but that is definitely no longer the case. Still, I guess it makes sense not to fully move there until I understand how things work.

Anyways, a byproduct of the degoogling is that I got into a bunch of other things, like, for example, writing this silly blog. It has been six months since I started. There have been times when I wrote like crazy and times when the rhythm diminished so much that my mother complained. I guess that this reflects a different incarnation of the working-like-crazy/biological-rest rhythm. Anyways, I am completely amazed at how much this is for me. I would have never thought that I would have enough to say to not bore myself. I mean, other than the occasional letters I have written—sí, mamá, ya sé que no te las he escrito a ti—I don’t think that I wrote anything besides math since I left high school. And in high school, I hated writing. I mean, we were given a target of how many words we had to write as a minimum, and when I counted, I counted everything. The German version of et cetera is und so weiter, written u.s.w., and these three letters were evidently counted as three words. Probably, I didn’t count periods and commas, but I am sure that I was tempted. I hated it. But now I find it extremely easy to just sit here and write, letting ideas flow while I write. A funny thing is that, although I know that nobody else reads them, I would never write these things for myself. Also, knowing that they are online makes me take a bit more care with how things are written. It forces me to reread it. I am amazed that I am doing this, but it is actually fantastic. I have been told often enough that when I talk, I hold monologues on whatever is in my mind at that moment. I guess that is what these things are.

Another curious byproduct of degoogling has been that I have been using the web much more than before. Now, I evidently used the web before to do math, to search things, to idiotify myself, for all those things one does. What I mean is that I have been using the web to build things: from the treasure hunt I built for my daughter, to the site with quizzes for her, to a silly app we use now at home to plan meals and shopping, to—the crown jewel—the site with the things I cook.

I evidently see that most of these obsessions of mine are, at best, kind of silly. I know there are much more professional meal and grocery planning apps, and that it is a bit silly to spend the time to build one. I understand that, given the amount of trash produced globally, spending a couple of hours every weekend picking up candy wrappers and cigarette butts in my neighborhood is kind of silly. I understand that not eating meat is silly. I understand that making the point of flying less is silly, and probably hypocritical. I understand that it is not clear why paying money to OVH to host my webpage and such makes any more sense than using Google services. I understand that spending hours writing things that nobody reads is kind of stupid. I understand that having a shitty site with my recipes is, at best, kind of pointless. I understand all of that. Still, I think that these things help me stay “mentally young.” In any case, I don’t think I can deal with life in a different way. And I need to keep myself busy when I am not doing math like crazy. The alternative is to answer emails, go to talks, and referee papers. The horror.